Hello, I don't know if it had been asked, but I think it would be nice and useful to have variable strings available. For instance, the distance between two tracking points could return a variable you could use to modulate another parameter. Great to display texty values or to animate effects automatically.

When I click on a masked area, I wish Hitfilm knew I was trying to click on a masked area rather than an invisible part of a different layer completely. I dare say that hardly anyone ever wants to click on part of something they cannot see.

BobDiMarzio No; unfortunately that would require me to know which layer I would need to click on in the list of layers. I want to click on what is visible to me in the preview windows. Look at the amount of space between the masked images; they don't overlap; I should be able to click on any one of those areas and automatically select the visible image I have clicked on, not the rest of the invisible image that has been masked out.

"Unfortunately there's no layer/track lock in HitFilm at the moment. Definitely a feature I'd personally like to see implemented. I can confirm that it's on our internal feature tracker, though, I don't have any information on when it might see the light of day."

For the Luminance Key Effect (actually all the keying effects, but this one particularly) to have a Use Layer Option, so you can apply a key from one layer to another without having to duplicate layers, create composites and use Grade Layers to get the same result.

Like in this question and the solution. This time it was 'only' a duplicated layer; often it's more complicated if, say, a Fractal Layer is involved.

@PalaconoAs someone who's dealt with keying on multiple features, I can tell you that keying cannot be applied in a blanket like manner. Every shot is different no matter how close in lighting they may appear.

Sorry, I'll elaborate further. The ability to reference Layer B to use as the Luminance Key for Layer A allows you to burn through in interesting ways such as that at the end of the link in my post above.

When using more complicated 'Luminance Keys'; generated by Fractal Noise or other things, you're forced to use Set Matte - which has no threshold or feather adjustments - combined with Matte Cleaner (which has its own issues ), and possibly either a Grade Layer to flatten it all, or needing to embed the 'Key Result' in another composite shot. All of which could be avoided by having a Use Layer for Luminance Key (and Hue & RGB Key and Color Difference Key (also a Colour picker for that one instead of Red,Green,Blue).

When you zoom into the viewer window with the mouse wheel, the rate of zoom decreases drastically so you have to give your finger a good workout to get to 500% zoom. I wish that there wasn't such a drastic diminishing rate of return on zooming in with the mouse wheel.

I would like it if there was a double row of tabs for 'MEDIA', 'EFFECTS'. 'CONTROLS' etc so I don't have to scroll backwards and forwards. People with limited screen-space might want to keep it as it is but now I have a second monitor, I'd appreciate being able to switch between tabs faster.

In this screenshot, the Windows driver properties window shows an example of what I mean by a double-row of tabs.

I wish I could select a lot of video clips at once and make them all into their own individual composite shots (with default names), instead of having to click each one individually, make it a composite shot, accept the name and then go back to where I was (in a different composite shot) because Hitfilm assumes I want to work on that composite shot rather than make a dozen more.

I wish there was an option for two or three times preview playback speed, not to affect the footage on the timeline but just temporarily affect the preview playback. It would be useful for when I'm looking for the point that something happens; it's coarser than regular playback but finer than scrubbing.

I wish you could unselect objects on the timeline by Ctrl + Clicking. Many programs include Windows Explorer allow items to be added and removed from a selection by Ctrl + LMB and Hitfilm even does it for layers in the composite editor. I discovered that Ctrl + dragging allows items to be removed from the selection but user intuition will suggest that Ctrl + LMB should work if said user has experience using many other programs in which this is the case.

I wish there was an option for two or three times preview playback speed, not to affect the footage on the timeline but just temporarily affect the preview playback. It would be useful for when I'm looking for the point that something happens; it's coarser than regular playback but finer than scrubbing. - @THX1139

Do you mean like J & L shortcuts? If you press L multiple times, it will playback at double, 4x the speed. This works in both timelines and the trimmer panel.

CedricBonnier Yes, that's what I wanted, thanks! I think it would be ideal if there were also controls displayed on the timeline and trimmer panels; if there were then I would learn the keyboard shortcuts when I inevitably mouse-over them.

I think it's best to get acquainted with keyboard shortcuts of any program. I believe the main reason for keyboard shortcuts is so that we don't have to have buttons for everything in the interface. You only have so much interface real estate to work with.

I notice the "L" shortcut for playback speed isn't listed, so maybe the list should be updated with each new release if any changes are made.

What Palacono said ("The ability to quickly shrink the length of a composite to the selected In and Out points, as is possible in AE. i.e lop off the end and move the clip in the timeline to frame 0 position.") +1

I don't think you can have a thumbnail of a Composite shot in the Media bin.

Composite shots are often multilayered. That would mean Hitfilm would have to mimic the full composite in the thumbnail. Which means including layers with chroma keys blended and incorporated into the thumbnail. A lot of processing would need to go into the creation of that thumbnail regardless of its size.

@Palacono HF always takes the first frame to display as a thumbnail and because most of the movs in that pack contain a fully transparent frame at the start, that's why you don't see any thumbnail. Maybe one thing that would help in this case would be to add the ability to preview different frames when the mouse is over the thumbnail like some other editors do. For non-media types, even though it would be possible, we have chosen not to display anything to save computing resources (eg on project open HF would have to render every comp's first frame, which could be really heavy). Saying that, we may reassess in the future. Please elaborate if I did not understand properly.

@THX1139 yeah, but even then, by definition, every change made to a comp then invalidates its cache file requiring a re-render, which is still a performance hit. Ok, maybe the thumb only updates when exiting that comp shot and switching timelines, but, that's... Still a performance hit. There really isn't a way to create comp thumbnails without introducing lag at some point.

@THX1139 yes, there are things we could do but again, there is only so much time in a day and we are a small team. We try to focus on features that will have the most impact. It's always a balance of "how many people really want this feature" vs "how much time would we have to spend to implement it" and then we prioritize them and implement them in order.